70-year-old man with hiking group from Cedar City collapses, dies in Kane County

A map detailing the area where a 70-year-old man with a hiking group collapsed and died in Kane County | Image courtesy of the Kane County Sheriff's Office / Google Maps, St. George News

ST. GEORGE — A 70-year-old man died while with a hiking group in Kane County Wednesday, according to county officials.

The Kane County Sheriff’s Office was alerted to the incident around 9 a.m. Wednesday following a notification from the Airforce Rescue Coordination Center that an emergency GPS beacon had been activated in northeastern Kane County, according to the Kane County Sheriff’s Office.

The GPS coordinates provided by the ARCC placed the signal on a popular trail near the confluence of Coyote Gulch and the Escalante River located in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The trail is used to exit the canyon at a location known as Crack in the Wall.

As the nature of the emergency was unknown, the Sheriff’s Office contacted Classic Aviation for aid in searching the area where the signal originated. A medical helicopter out of Page, Arizona also flew to the area and contacted a group of hikers who told the helicopter crew one of the hikers was dead.

The group consisted of six people out of Cedar City who had been rafting and hiking in the Escalante Canyon for five days up to that point. The deceased hiker, a 70-year-old man, had appeared to be in good health and was enjoying the activity when he collapsed, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Members of the group attempted to revive the man through CPR but were unsuccessful.

The deceased man’s body was subsequently sent to the Utah State Medical Examiner’s Office in Salt Lake City for examination.

The man’s name has not yet been released authorities.

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2020, all rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mori Kessler serves as a Senior Reporter for St. George News, having previously contributed as a writer and Interim Editor in 2011-12, and an assistant editor from 2012 to mid-2014. He began writing news as a freelancer in 2009 for Today in Dixie, and joined the writing staff of St. George News in mid-2010. He enjoys photography and won an award for photojournalism from the Society of Professional Journalists for a 2018 photo of a bee inspector removing ferals bees from a Washington City home. He is also a shameless nerd and has a bad sense of direction.